But easy does not always mean simple.

Google makes it easy to sign up, generate an ad and put it on your site, however, it’s not always so simple designing your site for interest, finding high paying keywords and placing your ads so that they attract maximum clicks.

Here are a few surefire tips that will help draw interest to your site and your ads while helping you get the clicks that will make you money.

1. Build content rich sites

Content rich sites do several things for you. They keep viewers on your site because you are providing information of interest. It’s also important to keep the information refreshed periodically with up-to-date and current content. This is not only useful for your viewers, the search engines like it as well.

Sites containing useful content will also help establish you as an expert in your field allowing viewers to respect your opinions and suggestions. But most importantly, good content will keep your viewers coming back to your site. They will bookmark your site more often and notify their friends a lot more.

2. Research and use higher paying keywords.

Develop site pages using topics that contain high paying keywords while keeping the keywords relevant to your topic.

The Overture website has a free ‘keywords bid tool’ that is excellent for showing you what advertisers are paying for keywords.

For example, using this tool I can see that the keyword ‘pet medication’ has a maximum bid of $1.51 while the keyword ‘pet name’ has a maximum bid of $.11. If I were looking for informational pages to add to my pet site, the clear choice here would be to develop a page about pet medications and optimize that page for the keyword ‘pet medication’.

3. Place your ads in the upper left hand quarter of your website.

Studies show that people almost always scan your site from the top left working down. Placing a vertical skyscraper ad in that section can help increase your click through rate from 2% to as much as 30% or higher.

4. Don’t use horizontal banners or ads.

Google recommends that you use vertical as opposed to horizontal ads. Web surfers see lots of horizontal banners and ads and they almost instantaneously avoid them.

According to Google, wider ad formats such as the large rectangle and inline rectangle also tend to perform quite well. This is probably due to the fact that they are more reader friendly allowing you to read more text at a glance without having to skip a line and return to the left margin every few words.

My experience is that positioning these ads just before or just after your main content can increase your clickthrough rate substantially.

5. Avoid the Dead Zones

Google research has shown that there are zones within your site that won’t generate clicks. These areas are the top right of your site, the bottom right-hand corner and the very bottom. Ads in these areas are often ignored. Keep your ads to the upper left and center or just above or below your primary content.

6. Coordinate the ad colors to match your site colors.

Google adsense offers an array of colors that you can use to display your ads. Choose the two main colors of your site and use those colors for your ad. Keep the URL link of the ad in blue since this is the link color that most viewers are used to. The idea is to blend your ads with your site content so as to invite more clicks.

7. Follow the adsense program policies to the letter.

Google keeps a close eye on how their ads are displayed and they will cancel you immediately if you break the rules. Google adsense is an excellent way to bring in some extra revenue so don’t risk losing a good thing.

The intro made a compelling argument how atoms would ultimately give way to bits, forever changing the way we acquire, access and utilize products and information. Being a member of PC Magazine, this was extremely important to me – it foretold the death of the publishing industry, no?

Given this backdrop, it seems that the death of atoms [at least for publishers] may be a little premature – even today. Looking at the most recent PC magazine and Maximum PC issues, it seems that Adsense has gone atomic.

Google took out full page ads in both of these publications and resold the space to adsense customers, allowing these companies to gain a foothold into publications at a fraction of the cost. Publish.com did a writeup on it, complete with interviews with the adsense participants. The ads can be viewed online as well.

I remember talking about this very strategy many years ago at a PC Magazine editors day dinner with some industry ad execs in Boston. Bridging the gap – I mentioned – between online banner ads and magazine ad space from an online perspective seemed an exciting proposition and a unique position unmet by existing ad networks. I got polite nods and a few ahhs from it, but nothing materialized.

That is, until now. Chalk another one up for Google.